Cable television (CATV), originally introduced in the late 1940's as a way to transmit television signals by coaxial cables to houses in areas of poor reception, has over the years been modified and extended to enable the cable medium to transport a growing number of different types of digital data, including both digital television and broadband Internet data.
One of the most significant improvements occurred in the 1990's, when a number of major electronics and cable operator companies, working through CableLabs, a non-profit R&D consortium, introduced the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS). First introduced in the late 1990's as DOCSIS version 1.0, and upgraded many times since (currently at DOCSIS version 3.0, with a draft DOCSIS 3.1 specification released in 2013), the DOCSIS standard defines the Physical Layers (PHY) and Media Access Control (MAC) layers needed to send relatively large amounts of digital data through coaxial cables that were originally designed to handle analog standard definition television channels.
This television signal was transmitted as a combination amplitude modulated signal (for the black and white portion), quadrature-amplitude modulated signal (for the color portion), and frequency modulated signal (for the audio portion), and this combined signal will be designated as a Frequency Division Multiplexed (FDM) signal. With the advent of digital television and high definition television standardization in the late 1980's and early 1990's, the basic 6 MHz bandwidth spectrum of analog television was retained, but the modulation scheme was changed to a more sophisticated and higher data rate Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) scheme, which can encode digital information onto a very complex QAM analog signal (waveform).
The DOCSIS standard was built upon this analog and digital TV foundation, and specified additional standards to provide broadband Internet services (Internet protocols, or IP), voice over IP, custom video on demand, and other modern services based upon the QAM data transmission waveforms previously established for digital and high definition television.
As a result, simple coaxial cables have been gradually upgraded to accommodate ever-increasing demands for digital data. At each house (or apartment, office, store, restaurant or other location), the household connects to the CATV cable by a cable modem, uses the cable modem to extract downstream DOCSIS digital data (frequently used for high-speed Internet), and inject upstream DOCSIS digital data (again frequently used for high-speed Internet applications).
Unfortunately, even in a coax cable, there is a finite amount of bandwidth available to transmit data. Coax cables and their associated radiofrequency interface equipment have typically only used the frequency range under about 1000 MHz, and so there are limits to how much data the 1950's era coaxial cable can ultimately transmit. By contrast, optical fiber (fiber optics, fiber) technology, which uses much higher optical frequencies (with wavelengths typically in the 800-2000 nanometer range), can transmit a much higher amount of data. Optical fiber data rates typically are in the tens or even hundreds of gigabits per second. Indeed, the entire RF CATV cable spectrum from 0 to 1000 MHz can be converted to optical wavelengths (such as 1310 nm or 1550 nm), be carried over an optical fiber, and then be converted back to the full RF CATV cable spectrum at the other end of the fiber, without coming close to exhausting the ability of the optical fiber to carry additional data. This conversion process can be achieved by relatively simple optical to digital or digital to optical converters, in which the CATV RF waveforms are simply converted back and forth to a light signal by simple (“dumb”) E/O or O/E converters, located in nodes that connect optical fibers to CATV cable (fiber nodes).
Optical fiber technology has been widely used for high capacity computer networks, and these networks often do not use the DOCSIS protocols or QAM protocols to transmit data. Rather, these high capacity computer networks often use entirely different types of data transmission protocols, such as the Ethernet protocols IEEE 802.3ah, 1000BASE-LX10, 1000Base-BX10, and others. These networks and protocols are often referred to as GigE networks, which is an abbreviation of the Gigabyte speeds and Ethernet protocols used for fiber based computer network. Thus if a user desires to transfer computer data from RF QAM waveforms transported over a CATV cable to a high speed GigE fiber network, the data must be transformed back and forth between the DOCSIS cable QAM waveforms and the alternate protocols (often Ethernet protocols) used in fiber GigE networks.
Although ideally, the best way to satisfy the ever increasing household demand for digital data (e.g. video-on demand, high speed Internet, voice over IP, etc.) would be by extending optical fiber to each household, this would be an incredibly expensive solution. By contrast, cable based CATV solutions have already been implemented for tens of millions of households, and this expense has already been borne and amortized over decades of use, starting from the 1950s. As a result, it is far more economically attractive to find schemes enable the existing, if bandwidth limited, CATV cable system, to be further extended to meet the ever-growing demands for additional data.